> The whole decision seems like a joke to me and a lost opportunity to set a decent design standard.
That would require that the individuals involved actually have taste. Instead, as with everything else from this administration, it's a toot on their favourite dog whistle.
Nah, it's just the US reinventing the German Antiqua-Fraktur dispute from more than a century ago, where only Fraktur was appropriate for expressing serious Germanic ideas. A sans typeface is un-German... ahh, un-American!
Of course, a couple of decades after that, Fraktur was declared too Jewish and thoroughly eradicated, killing among other things the sole remaining independent strain of Latin-script handwriting (other than the dominant one invented as a book-copying aid by the Italian humanists, thus “italic”).
Wasn't it mostly Hitler's personal dislike for it? That and the fact that readers in the greater Reich (the bits outside Germany) wouldn't be familiar with, or able to read, Fraktur
Donald Trump and, frankly, those around him in general are what poor people think rich people are like, but I wouldn’t exactly be one to claim that the design language used by the Biden Administration, like switching to Calibri, are very tasteful either. In leftist popular culture there is a love for modernist style architecture, minimalism, and a disrespect for building beautiful things that cost a lot of money or time. Rightwing circles have their own problems here too, to be fair.
But mandating Greco-Roman architecture by the Trump administration for federal buildings was actually a huge win for taste and design. Though unfortunately many people have become confused about what good design is or the reason to choose that architecture style can’t be overcome by their distaste for President Trump or his administration, which is very arguably deserved based on their conduct, speech, or mannerisms.
When we take away formality or tradition from governmental institutions you take away pieces of civilization and governmental authority that we, really can’t afford to lose. When government buildings are designed to look like shit, for example, one might come to believe the government is shit too (Democrat or Republican run) and the next thing you know you’re running red lights or flipping off the court because the document they sent you in the mail doesn’t look scary and official.
Secretary Duffy was right too about airline travel. Well, there is another to unpack there. Flying is lame compared to rail unless you’re flying across the country, and being shaken down by the TSA is undignified and thus people dress to meet the lack of dignity and respect the government shows them at the airline terminal.
But he’s not wrong.
When you put more care into how you dress you instinctively put more care into how you treat others and how you dress impacts how others treat you. I’m not suggesting a mandate or anything, but I’ll fly in a suit and tie easily and comfortably all day long over stained sweatpants and bringing my comfort dog on to the flight to annoy everyone. Dress how you want, but if you can’t take care of the basics I’m not sure where else you think society is going other than downhill in a fashion.
> In leftist popular culture there is a love for modernist style architecture, minimalism, and a disrespect for building beautiful things that cost a lot of money or time.
Which leftist popular culture? I mean sure, there was bauhaus, but it’s not like banks are putting up neo-gothic office buildings, they’re putting up spires of glass.
I prefer the protestant restrained aesthetic. Spiritual over material. Governmental buildings should be tastefully humble. It is a signal that the government is a servant of the people.
What’s an example that you’re thinking of? I think this can make sense - I mean if you have a town of 5,000 people and a government office there or something you probably don’t need a big, giant, building (unless that’s the message you’re trying to send). It’s also impractical from a cost-standpoint.
Federal buildings though should have gravitas and signify importance. If they don’t, and/or we think the government isn’t important, I’ll take my tax dollars back, thank you very much.
You can liken this to how western countries are leaving Christianity. Who can believe in God when you drive a Jeep to your mega church next to Costco and everyone is wearing sweatpants? (I’m not particularly spiritual but I see the problems here)
In Europe, Protestant churches are generally built much more humble than Catholic ones, because they are built with different philosophies in mind. (I am not familiar with American churches, so no comments there)
Similarly, I prefer government buildings to go for a similar route. It doesn’t mean that buildings have to ugly or small. But similar to Protestant churches it can humble, functional and elegant at the same time.
I do find it faintly ironic that Sort Of Greek Or Roman Or Something architecture was the villain in Ayn Rand's novel.
Living here in DC I don't especially mind Federalist Architecture, even though it does look like somebody saw some photos of Rome and Athens and kinda mashed them together. But I don't love insisting that a 19th century view of the second century BC must forevermore be the only possible taste.
If you have another architectural style for western civilization which bases its institutions on Greece and Rome, I’d be interested in learning more about it. It’s not necessarily about a 19th century view of 2nd century BC architectural concepts (which itself is a bit of a farce of a comment) but more so about anchoring the longevity and legitimacy of governmental institutions to a historical heritage.
Similarly I wouldn’t recommend, say, that the Afghani people or Mongolia for example build federalist or Greco-Roman style architecture for their government buildings as it wouldn’t make much sense and wouldn’t have any basis in their history.
There’s also some science to it and we know the asymmetrical buildings and buildings which make entrances and other expected features hard to find cause measurable levels of stress and anxiety in the observer. Hostile architecture.
I don’t mind the overall point of your argument, but it’s funny to see a claim that Americans have more reason to use Greco-Roman architecture than a Middle Eastern country. Classical Greek art actually took a lot of influence from the Middle East, and I believe Alexander actually reached te area around Afghanistan (and a Hellenistic kingdom existed there for a while), unlike America.
Well I wouldn’t argue Afghanistan is part of the Middle East culturally or geographically, but even if you did want to argue that, Alexander came and conquered that area for a little bit and then left. It wasn’t ever really culturally Greek.
But the main point isn’t whether afghanistan is Greek; it’s not of course. The main point is that it’s funny to hear an American argue that the US has more of a claim on Greek architecture than Afghanistan.
Because its not real. He is completely right its a 19th century cargo cult of classicism. Its a modern anachronistic mashup of various old styles, I can bet if you asked an actual Greek or Roman era expert they will say these buildings combine elements 500 600 years apart.
I like how it looks but its also lazy and cheesy, I can't blame people who think we need more styles.
You’re missing the point. The styles aren’t meant to be 1-1 matches of Greek or Roman architecture, they’re rather good attempts at building and designing our governments buildings which that they harken to where our legal and cultural traditions hail from. That’s why the Capitol looks the way it does.
I’m not sure how that’s lazy or cheesy. I’m certainly open minded to other styles but they need to be rooted in western civilization. Otherwise you wind up with silly things like replicas of the Eiffel Tower in weirdly designed and inappropriate little French mockup towns, or you wind up with the lowest common denominator - Wal-Mart and strip malls.
Its literally in the name, neoclassicism. All I am saying is why did you say its "farcical" that its a modern view of an old style?
I think it is a lazy copy paste of old tropes. I know because I can see these tendencies in myself too. I like some old styles and if I had my way I could keep listening to newer bands that replicate this style my whole life. But the thing is, without the original inspirational fire behind the style its just a nice copy.
I see you had dissed on brutalism some time before, I really don't understand why. I feel at least in some ways brutalism is a non-pastiche manner achieves things like the imposing sense of grandeur and power of classical architecture.
> If you have another architectural style for western civilization which bases its institutions on Greece and Rome, I’d be interested in learning more about it.
Carolingian architecture didn't just cargo cult, they literally pilfered Roman columns and integrated them into anachronistic designs. If I recall my art history class correctly, the columns from Charlemagne's Palatine Chapel were "repurposed" (looted) from a Roman temple. [1]
This is also an example of architectural skeuomorphism: designing something in a way reminiscent of an older thing, to borrow the associations people have with it. In this case, Roman authority.
As an American I think they’re tacky too. That style of architecture for an airport doesn’t make sense really. Well. I bet it could be pulled off. But the “architects” designing the airports are the same people designing Greco-Roman architecture on disfigured American McMansions.
Art Decó, on the other hand, would look pretty Americana and elegant for your buildings.
It's basically the classical American city depiction for Europeans (noir movies, Superman, old comic strips from newspapers...)
Yea I don’t mind Art Deco at all. I think the car company Cadillac, which is based in the Detroit area, which is in my mind where I think of as the home of that style (even if it’s not), started including Art Deco as part of their design language and I think it’s a good use.
The leftists think trump is a dictator. The right thinks trump is an irresponsibly spending warmonger. And everyone thinks the entire damn government is rife with all sorts of bad things.
What Trump and Friends(TM) are doing here is basically stylizing the government to mimic things people associate with legitimacy since that's in short supply to the government these days. Serif fonts that harken back to when documents were for serious things and handwriting was the less formal format. Greco-roman government buildings and other "antique-ish" styles that subtly imply the legitimacy of the institution therein always has been and always will be.
Likewise I would bet a lot of money that over the next 20yr we don't see many/any 1920s-60s government buildings renovated to remove that aesthetic because people associate those decades with government that seemingly was functional.
Your last paragraph has it totally backwards. The government puts on this huge stupid show of looking big and important and fancy in order to distance itself from the fact that at the end of the day it's an organization that's fairly capriciously deploying violence.
Well, to encapsulate your point here - you don’t believe in the legitimacy of government so of course any attempt by the government to legitimize itself you’d find disagreeable. Is that right?
Projecting an image of legitimacy behooves the government because it makes everything they do (and there is almost always someone who loses dearly whenever the government does something) that much less likely to be resisted. Government is always pushing at the limits of its authority or at least going right up to them so just "seeming" a little more legitimate in the minds of as many people as possible pays back because at the margin that turns into a bunch of fights you don't have to fight, all the work you don't have to do to justify your actions, the appeals that aren't filed, etc, etc.
Think about how HN just takes whatever the EPA says at face value vs scrutinizing ICE. Every office, department, etc, etc, aspires to get the EPA treatment from as much of society as possible. Acting the part is part is part of that.
npm did not always do it right, and IMO still does not do it completely right (nor does pnpm, my preferred replacement for npm -- but it has `--frozen-lockfile` at least that forces it to do the right thing) because transitive dependencies can still be updated.
cargo can also update transitive dependencies (you need `--locked` to prevent that).
Ruby's Bundler does not, which is preferred and is the only correct default behaviour. Elixir's mix does not.
I don't know whether uv handles transitive dependencies correctly, but lockfiles should be absolute and strict for reproducible builds. Regardless, uv is an absolute breath of fresh air for this frequent Python tourist.
npm will not upgrade transient dependencies if you have a lockfile. All the `forzen-lockfile` or `npm ci` commands does is prevent upgrades if you have incompatible versions specified inside of `package.json`, which should never happen unless you have manually edited the `package.json` dependencies by hand.
(It also removed all untracked dependencies in node_modules, which you should also never have unless you've done something weird.)
In cold weather, one should always dress for 5℃ warmer than the temperature outside when you have a bike longer than 5 km. Runners pretty much have to do the same. Your body heat and good layering will take care of everything else.
Don't need one in Toronto within a ½ day or so of the snow stopping for the major bicycle routes (including the MGT).
Calgary apparently also does a good job of clearing its bike lanes.
And I do my Costco shopping by bike year-round. I think I've used the car for large purchases at Costco twice in the last year.
I _rarely_ drive my car anywhere in Toronto, and find the streets on bike safer than most of the sidewalks in January -- they get plowed sooner than most homeowners and businesses clear the ice from their sidewalks.
And in Toronto we're rank amateurs at winter biking. Look at Montreal, Oslo, or Helsinki for even better examples. Too bad we've got a addle-brained carhead who doesn't understand public safety or doing his own provincial as our premier.
I've made a private MacPorts port[1]; if I find that I use it frequently enough, I might contribute it to the main MacPorts port repo[2].
One thing that's missing from my perspective (and this is probably true for Homebrew packaging as well, but I don't do that) is Git tags / GitHub releases associated with your Cargo releases.
I can work around it for now by using an explicit release (`9ccd9bf53f9a309ccda42b5c17e9c1056493fb90` is what I'm assuming was your 0.1.0 release point).
I've also assumed that npm10 is sufficient (which currently installs node22 on MacPorts).
MacPorts separates `node` and `npm` packages like many package managers do:
npm10 @10.9.3 (devel)
Description: npm is a package manager for node. You can use it to install and publish your node programs. It manages dependencies and does other cool stuff.
Homepage: https://www.npmjs.com/
Library Dependencies: nodejs22
Conflicts with: npm3, npm4, npm5, npm6, npm7, npm8, npm9, npm11
Platforms: any
License: MIT
Policy: openmaintainer
The Portfile that I created specifies that if `npm` is present in $PATH (which isn't the user's $PATH because MacPorts uses `sudo`) then it should be used and assumed correct; otherwise, it says that the `npm10` port must be installed (because the instructions for oxdraw indicate that one must run `npm install && npm build`).
I think that trusted publishing has had a bigger impact than the gem signing that was introduced years ago and never worked well because the infrastructure wasn't present.
The maintainer is eccentric. He refuses to use anything that runs JavaScript out of a sense of "Free Software Purity", which means that he cannot use most of the ecosystem to which Ruby has migrated.
He has only contributed to Ruby via the ruby-core mailing list (he does not use the RubyMine interface which backs ruby-core) and the main Ruby git repo hosted by the Ruby team, never anything on GitHub.
I'm sort of surprised that the RubyGems MFA threshold hasn't been updated (it was 180M total downloads in 2022; my gems combined have > 2.5B downloads, so I was never not going to pass the threshold), but he's under 70M downloads shy and each release gets about 15M downloads or so.
I think that his position is irresponsible in today's threat environment, but given the amount of work that I'm doing for OSS maintenance that's just responding to bloody Dependabot updates…
uv has replaced that for me, and has replaced most other tools that I used with the (tiny amount of) Python that I write for production.
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